William Lucas

William Lucas was born in 1908 in Kelowna, where he received his early schooling. After graduation, he attended Normal School and then taught for two years in a one-room school at Copper Mountain. After obtaining his BA in mathematics from UBC, he moved to Princeton as principal, next to Cranbrook as principal, and then, in 1946, to Trail as Inspector of schools, as school district superintendents were then called.

In 1954 he moved to North Vancouver as Inspector and became its first "superintendent" two years later. At that time North Vancouver had 8500 pupils. By the time Mr. Lucas retired, in January 1974, the population had risen to 22,500 pupils, four high schools and twenty elementary schools had been built, and School District 44 had become a leader in education in the province. Mr. Lucas died in 1985.

The key to Mr. Lucas' success was the kind of people he attracted to the district, the opportunities he gave them to do what they did best, his conviction that schools existed to serve students, and the structures he set in place for the orderly running of schools.